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The Kochs are cooking up a new dirty-energy political scheme

by LorrieThomson Posted on June 17, 2014

Kochs in the kitchen again

The Kochs are cooking up a new dirty-energy political scheme

By

Gus Ruelas / Greenpeace

The Koch brothers have seen Tom Steyer’s $100 million bet and they’re raising it by almost $200 million more.

Steyer, billionaire hedge-fund manager turned climate activist, set a goal earlier this year of spending $100 million in the 2014 midterm elections to support candidates who care about climate change. So far fundraising for his super PAC has been weak, but the Kochs aren’t taking any chances.

The Daily Beast reports that “the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups – including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin.” Here’s more:

A few Koch network-backed nonprofit groups including [Americans for Prosperity] have long fought against climate change regulations, a carbon tax, and subsidies for renewable energy. But lately, the Koch universe seem to be facing bigger energy threats stemming from Washington, state governments and big liberal checkbooks.

The new energy initiative is the handiwork of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the Koch network’s central fundraising hub, which was established in late 2011 as a trade group, according to an email to the group’s members from [Koch fundraiser Kevin] Gentry. In 2012, the fledgling group — which claims some 200 members who each kick in at least $100,000 yearly — funneled over $230 million dollars to numerous other non-profits in the Koch ecosystem according to the group’s 2012 tax returns. …

Gentry’s email stressed that liberal donors, led by hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, have plans to spend as much as $100 million on climate change issues and ads to make it a top-tier issue in the election. He noted that environmental groups had recently run a $5 million “clean energy” ad blitz in Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina, all of which are considered “focus” states for Freedom Partners and among the states where Americans for Prosperity has spent over $35 million on attack ads against Democratic Senate candidates on Obamacare.

It’s not enough that the Kochs and their pals want to condemn you to climatic misery. They also want to prevent you from accessing affordable health care. Those issues are mostly unrelated but, in Gentry’s email, he links them, opining that the “new multi million dollar campaign by environmentalists is arguably an effort to distract from the failures of Obamacare.”

Because with all of the environmental challenges facing the U.S. and the world, what else would environmentalists want to do but “distract” voters from an affordable health-care law?


Source
Koch Brothers Unveil New Strategy at Big Donor Retreat, The Daily Beast

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The Kochs are cooking up a new dirty-energy political scheme

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Yes, frackers can forcibly drill your land, even if you don’t want them to

by BarbraSingletar Posted on June 13, 2014

don’t frack me, bro

Yes, frackers can forcibly drill your land, even if you don’t want them to

By

13254

Jump in. You have no choice.

Forced pooling isn’t some kind of college pool party that jocks compel nerds to attend, resulting in wacky hijinks. It’s a grim legal tool, dating back nearly a century in some states, that allows drillers to tap the fossil fuels beneath a reluctant landowner’s property — if enough of their neighbors sell their drilling rights. The philosophy of such laws is that subterranean pools of oil and natural gas pay no heed to property lines.

As hydraulic fracturing takes grip across the nation, frackers are taking advantage of state laws that were drafted to allow forced pooling for conventional gas and oil drilling.

Newsweek took a trip to Marcellus Shale country and interviewed Suzanne Matteo and Bob Svetlak, two of the residents who’ve been stymieing drilling plans by refusing to sign agreements that would allow Hilcorp to frack their land in Pulaski Township, Penn., in exchange for per-acre payments and royalties:

[L]ate last August, the company filed an application with the state to drill on a large swath of land that includes property owned by Bob Svetlak, 73, … and now the company was trying to use a 1961 “forced pooling” law to access the natural gas beneath his 14.6 acres without his consent.

Matteo says that when she heard about Hilcorp’s move on Svetlak’s property, she knew hers would be next. She, along with Svetlak and two other property owners, represent 35 holdout acres within the 3,267-acre area that Hilcorp has proposed as a drilling unit. Sure enough, a neighbor who had leased to Hilcorp soon showed Matteo a letter from the company encouraging leaseholders to attend a meeting before the state Environmental Hearing Board to cheer on its forced pooling application (referred to as a Well Spacing Application).

“By integrating the tracts in red, Hilcorp can potentially drill twice as many wells into your unit, allowing Hilcorp to fully develop the minerals beneath your land,” the letter said, adding that without forced pooling, more wells would need to be drilled and less gas would be produced. In short, the letter implied to the leaseholders, unless their holdout neighbors were forcibly pooled, their own future royalties would be in jeopardy.

The letter included a map, with Matteo’s land as well as three other unleased tracts clearly identified in red. …

After seeing the letter sent to her neighbors, Matteo and two other holdout property owners filed a lawsuit against Hilcorp, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the state attorney general, alleging that the forced pooling law is a violation of their constitutional right to private property, as well as a violation of state eminent domain law, which stipulates that any taking of private land must be for a public, not private, purpose. …

Despite the health concerns, some of Matteo’s neighbors are frustrated with her and others for holding up the royalties they will receive once the gas starts flowing. Bruce and Jody Clingan, who own a 200-acre golf course nearby, received a bonus of over $500,000 when they signed with Hilcorp, plus 18 percent royalties on future production. Bruce Clingan told CBS that he couldn’t understand why “1 percent” of landowners in the proposed unit could prevent drilling to which the other “99 percent” have consented.

Which is why Matteo believes her lawsuit is just the beginning. “I know I’m screwed, no matter what,” she says. “There’s going to be wells near me no matter what. There’s a large landowner behind me and across the street that would probably love the money for a well pad. But I know we’re getting used as a precedent. If they get away with this with us, it’s going to happen everywhere.”

Forced pooling laws are currently on the books in 39 states, with different states requiring different thresholds of consent among landholders before drilling can be forced upon all of them. Some lawmakers are trying to rein in such laws, while others are trying to introduce new ones.


Source
Your Lawn Need Fracking?, Newsweek

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Yes, frackers can forcibly drill your land, even if you don’t want them to

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Your clothes dryer is a huge energy waster

by JoleenPercy Posted on June 12, 2014

All wet

Your clothes dryer is a huge energy waster

By

Shutterstock

Buy a new major appliance today and it’ll be a lot more energy efficient than what was on the market 20 or 30 years ago. Unless, that is, you’re buying a dryer.

The Natural Resources Defense Council on Thursday put out an issue brief and call to action regarding money- and energy-wasting clothes dryers. While manufacturers have boosted the efficiency of washing machines, refrigerators, and other appliances in recent decades, their enthusiasm for doing the same thing for dryers has been damp at best. Dryers remain so energy hungry that even a new one can consume as much electricity as an efficient new clothes washer, refrigerator, and dishwasher combined.

NRDCClick to embiggen.

NRDC concluded that Americans spend $9 billion a year on the electricity used to dry their clothes. If their dryers were all upgraded to the best models available in Europe, Australia, and Asia, those costs would drop by $4 billion. And because most of the nation’s electricity still comes from fossil fuels, those upgrades would keep 16 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year. Here are some highlights from the findings:

There are 89 million residential clothes dryers in the United States (75 percent electric models, 25 percent natural gas). Although electric dryers dominate the U.S. market, natural gas dryers typically cost 50 percent to 75 percent less to operate.

A typical household pays over $100 in annual utility bills to operate an electric dryer and $40 for a gas dryer. Homes with electric dryers pay at least $1,500 over the dryer’s lifetime for the electricity to power the machine. …

U.S. policies for clothes dryers lag behind those for other appliances. …

How a consumer uses a dryer is almost as important as which dryer is purchased. Choosing a lower operating temperature can slow the drying process a little, but it cuts energy use significantly. Stopping the dryer before all of the clothes are bone-dry saves time and energy, while reducing wrinkles and helping clothes last longer.

Of course, a brighter solution for reducing the costs and climate impacts of drying clothes is out there, just blowing in the wind.


Source
A Call to Action for More Efficient Clothes Dryers, NRDC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Your clothes dryer is a huge energy waster

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Climate change could flood your streets with doo-doo and toxic waste

by BudHockaday Posted on June 12, 2014

Ah shit

Climate change could flood your streets with doo-doo and toxic waste

By

Stefan Klocek

Oakland and surrounds.

Rising seas and ferocious storms linked to global warming won’t just bring water to our doorsteps. In some cities, it will deliver a witches’ brew of sewage from low-lying drains and toxic waste from Superfund sites and industrial areas.

That’s because when seas rise, they don’t just top over shorelines. They can burble up through waterfront infrastructure like sewage systems. New America Media reports from Oakland, a port city built along San Francisco Bay — an estuary that’s vulnerable to the rises in the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge:

Because the flatlands are the lowest part of the city, they receive the overflow in a storm drainage system that relies on gravity and a sewer system that planners expect will be overwhelmed by sustained high water levels or by a storm surge of three or four feet above high tide. Water, and whatever industrial runoff or sewage is mixed with it, would backflow out of storm sewers onto streets, yards and basements.

“Some of the first flooding likely to occur will be in the low lying areas in Oakland, where the poor people happen to live,” said Lindy Lowe, lead senior planner of the Adapting to Rising Tides project of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. …

“Nobody from the hills to the flatlands will be able to flush their toilets” if a storm surge or rising tides were to top four feet, said Jeremy Lowe, sea level rise program manager at ESA and author of tidal wetland design guidelines for San Francisco Bay and an ecosystem-based climate change adaptation plan. …

“Most of the effects on communities will be the flooding of infrastructure,” said BCDC’s Wendy Goodfriend, a senior planner on the Adapting to Rising Tides project, with no where for the water to drain. “Drainage is a problem in East Oakland and West Oakland. These neighborhoods rely on sump pumps,” she said, to deal with saturated yards and homes during rainy seasons.

Short of armoring with New Orleans-style levees, the best adaptation solutions for cities like Oakland could be retrofitting and replacing infrastructure, relocating businesses, and abandoning neighborhoods. That’s a shitty pill to swallow.


Source
Sea Rise Threatens Oakland’s Sewer System, New American Media

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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This is how little it costs for states to go renewable

by FidelY93vuggr Posted on June 5, 2014

This is how little it costs for states to go renewable

By

Shutterstock

States can boost renewable energy capacity at bargain-basement prices, a new study finds.

Federal researchers examined the 29 states where renewable portfolio standards (RPS’s) have been in place for more than five years. They concluded that these standards, which require utilities to generate a certain percentage of power from clean sources, led to the development of 46,000 megawatts of renewable capacity up until 2012 — and that they raised electricity rates by an average of less than 2 percent.

NRELClick to embiggen.

(If you’re wondering why California’s green line extends above and below the zero-cost line, it’s because the researchers used two different methodologies — one suggested that the state’s ambitious standard resulted in net costs, while the other suggested that it actually resulted in net savings.)

The researchers, scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also examined other studies that have attempted to quantify the economic impacts of RPS policies: “A number of the studies examined economic development benefits annually or over the lifespan of the renewable energy projects, with benefits on the order of $1-$6 billion, or $22-30/MWh of renewable generation.” RPS’s can also help make electricity prices more stable, the researchers note.

And, as there’s more to life than electricity prices and economic development, it’s worth noting that RPS’s also contribute to water savings, cleaner air, and a more stable climate.

Nonetheless, renewable energy standards have been targeted by right-wing groups like American Legislative Exchange Council, which are pushing state legislatures to repeal them. The RPS foes are poised to score their first victory in Ohio. As Grist’s Eve Andrews wrote last week, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) is expected to sign a bill that would freeze the state’s renewable-energy and energy-efficiency standards.

It’s not just enviros and climate hawks who are bemoaning that development. Honda, Whirlpool, and 49 other businesses operating in Ohio sent a letter to Kasich on Wednesday objecting to the move. “Freezing the standards for two years creates a start-stop effect that will confuse the marketplace, disrupt investment and reduce energy savings for customers during this period,” they wrote. “We expect the result will be higher electric bills and less investment.”


Source
A Survey of State-Level Cost and Benefit Estimates of Renewable Portfolio Standards, NREL
51 businesses, 21 organizations in letter to Kasich: S.B. 310 will be harmful to Ohioans’ electric bills, burgeoning renewable industries, Columbus Business First

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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This is how little it costs for states to go renewable

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More oil spills ahead for Puget Sound?

by CarsonBermudez Posted on May 23, 2014

More oil spills ahead for Puget Sound?

By

Ingrid Taylar

The Puget Sound — prettier without an oily sheen.

It looks like Puget Sound – which isn’t actually a noise but a sprawling and ecologically rich estuary in Washington state – is about to get a whole lot oilier.

An ugly trifecta of fossil fuel export projects proposed around the sound would substantially boost shipping traffic, and a new report funded by the EPA and produced by academic scientists for a state agency warns that can be expected to bring oil spills with it.

If the Gateway Pacific coal export terminal is built at Cherry Point, Wash., and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline into Vancouver is expanded, and Vancouver’s Deltaport is expanded, the report warns that the frequency of ship groundings and collisions could rise by 18 percent. Regionally, the risks of a large oil spill could rise by about two-thirds, the researchers found. Here’s more from the AP:

“The problem area is the Haro Strait area and the approach to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where spill volumes could more than triple due to the potential new mix and volume of traffic,” said Todd Hass with the Puget Sound Partnership, the agency is charged with protecting the waterway.

Under a proposal by Kinder Morgan Canada, up to 34 tankers a month would be loaded with oil at a Vancouver-area terminal, up from about five tankers a month now. Those tankers would generally travel through the Haro Strait west of San Juan Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The report concludes that the risks could be reduced through improved vessel traffic management, more vessel inspections, reduced speed limits for ships, and more tug escorts. And the report points out that those measures could help reduce oil spill dangers regardless of whether the dangerous fossil fuel projects move forward.


Source
Study measures potential risk from increased shipping traffic in Puget Sound, Puget Sound Partnership
Study measures oil-spill risks from projects, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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More oil spills ahead for Puget Sound?

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San Francisco considers banning exports of coal and petcoke

by FrancinXYAO Posted on May 19, 2014

San Francisco considers banning exports of coal and petcoke

By

Chris Chabot

The city that kicked off a gay-marriage revolution, cracked down on Happy Meal toys, and battled bottled water is gunning for a new first. San Francisco wants to lead the nation in limiting fossil fuel exports.

At a hearing scheduled for Thursday, the San Francisco Environment Commission will consider a proposal to ban the bulk transportation of “hazardous fossil fuel materials,” such as coal and petroleum coke, within city limits. If the commission agrees, the proposal will be passed up to city and/or port leaders for further consideration. The proposed ban would also apply to crude oil, though crude exports are currently banned nationally — a ban that industry is fighting to overturn.

San Francisco isn’t acting alone in trying to stymie exports of coal and other fossil fuels to Asia. In February, the city’s lower-income neighbor, Oakland, rejected a bid by Bowie Resource Partners to use its port as a coal export terminal. And residents throughout the Pacific Northwest have been successfully campaigning against proposals to build hulking new coal terminals along their waterfronts.

Joshua Arce, president of the San Francisco Environment Commission, which advises city lawmakers, said West Coast cities and ports can work together to help bottle up the nation’s coal supplies and keep them in the ground, where they can do the climate and the environment no harm. He said they can also work to prevent petcoke, which is left behind after tar-sands oil from Canada is refined, from reaching export markets, where it can be burned to produce a filthy form of energy.

“There’s a widespread consensus that this is the right thing to do — to lay down a marker for the environment, and ban these hazardous fossil fuel materials forever in the City and County of San Francisco,” Arce said. “It’s not like we’re saying anything that’s not already the practice informally. Our port staff has said, time and time again, ‘no’ to coal. It’s time to make it an official policy.”

San Francisco’s port is perhaps best known for its cruise ship terminal along the city’s Disney Land-like northern waterfront, but the city’s southeastern waterfront has a long and heavy industrial history. A new bulk marine cargo terminal is included in southeastern neighborhood redevelopment plans. And the city is just a bay away from Richmond, which is home to Chevron’s explosion- and pollution-prone oil refinery. All of which makes city leaders nervous that their waterfront assets could one day be exploited by the nation’s fossil fuel merchants.

“The fossil fuel industry is never sleeping,” Arce said. “We never want there to be a day when a company that’s engaged in this aspect of the carbon economy makes an offer here that someone can’t refuse.”

—–

[Correction: This post originally reported that the Port of Oakland rejected a coal export proposal last week. In fact, it rejected it in February.]

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

by Volodyslav7uk Posted on May 16, 2014

mo’ warming, mo’ problems

Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

By

Shutterstock

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Ratings Services has found yet another way that fossil fuel burning by rich countries is going to screw over poor ones — by making it harder for them to borrow money.

S&P analysts identified climate change as one of two “global mega-trends” that will shape countries’ economic risks in the years to come (aging populations is the other trend). In a new report, the analysts said climate change would hurt nations’ creditworthiness, with poor countries the worst affected.

The American financial services company considered how vulnerable 116 countries are to sea-level rise, assessed the role of agriculture in each of their economies, and factored in the results of a climate vulnerability index produced by Notre Dame University. The analysts found that the credit ratings of Vietnam, Bangladesh, Senegal, Mozambique, Fiji, the Philippines, Nigeria, Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia were the most vulnerable to the worsening whims of the weather. Not exactly a group of G7 candidates. Bloomberg reports:

Global warming “will put downward pressure on sovereign ratings during the remainder of this century,” S&P analysts led by Moritz Kraemer in Frankfurt wrote. “The degree to which individual countries and societies are going to be affected by warming and changing weather patterns depends largely on actions undertaken by other, often far-away societies.” …

Changing rainfall patterns could affect agricultural yields, and altered weather could spread disease and pests, hitting productivity, they said. …

“Unlike in the case of aging, individual societies cannot by themselves meaningfully reduce the impact they will feel as the climate changes,” the analysts said. “A society may choose to reduce its carbon emissions unilaterally to reduce the risk of the potential consequences of global warming, but due to the global character most of the benefits of that society’s sacrifice will accrue to other nations.”

Affected countries might want to shake a tin can in the direction of Europe. The nations whose economies were deemed least vulnerable to climate change were Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Austria.


Source
Climate Change to Hit Sovereign Creditworthiness: S&P, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

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Strip club flooded by oil spill in L.A.

by KennethU81 Posted on May 15, 2014

PAH dance, anybody?

Strip club flooded by oil spill in L.A.

By

Shutterstock

A strip club was left a sticky mess Thursday morning following yet another pipeline spill.

A geyser of an estimated 10,000 gallons of oil spewed 20 to 50 feet out of a 20-inch crude pipeline at 1 a.m., leaving an oily pool in an industrial swath of Northeast Los Angeles and sending two people to the hospital with nausea. Here’s more from the L.A. Times:

Crews were able to shut off the pipeline remotely, but by the time that was done, the spill had created pools of oil, some about 40 feet wide and knee-deep in some places.

“It looked like a lake,” [fire captain Jamie] Moore said. …

Firefighters were able to largely contain the spill after contacting a nearby cement company and using loads of sand to cordon off the oil with berms, creating a dam-like structure. Tanker trucks were then able to use hoses to suck up the oil from the resulting “lagoon,” Moore said.

Four businesses were affected by street closures, but none more so than the Gentleman’s Club, which was evacuated after it was flooded with crude. Pity whatever poor soul works as a janitor there.


Source
10,000-gallon crude oil spill in Atwater looked ‘like a lake’, L.A. Times

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Strip club flooded by oil spill in L.A.

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A whole lot of oil spilled in the U.S. in 2013

by FranciscaDGY Posted on May 13, 2014

Oil in a day’s work

A whole lot of oil spilled in the U.S. in 2013

By

Shutterstock

Tip your 10-gallon hat to the gas and oil guys. The booming industry spilled 26 million gallons of oil, fracking fluid, fracking wastewater, and other toxic substances during 7,662 accidents in just 15 states last year.

That’s according to an analysis by EnergyWire, which studied state data to conclude that the number of spills was up 18 percent from the year before:

Many of the spills were small. But their combined volume totaled more than 26 million gallons … That’s the same volume as what gushed four years ago from BP PLC’s ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well in 11 days.

Some of the increase may have come from changes in spill reporting practices in a handful of states, but the number of spills and other mishaps rose even without counting those states.

Some of the biggest jumps were in the booming Bakken Shale. North Dakota, which is already contending with flaring and urban woes in its once sparsely populated western end, saw spills jump 42 percent even though the average number of rigs working in the state dropped 8 percent.

Across the state line in Montana, spills were up 48 percent, tracking with the 42 percent increase in rig count figures maintained by Baker Hughes Inc., a common measure of industry activity.

It’s called economic development, right?


Source
Spills up 18 percent in U.S. in 2013, EnergyWire

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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A whole lot of oil spilled in the U.S. in 2013

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